There is new and growing evidence that the failure to provide safe drinking water, or the fear (or reality) of contamination in tap water that forces people to buy bottled water, imposes special financial burdens on poor and minority communities.

The word 'Sustainability' is quite evocative isn't it? Not so much so as words like, 'Murder', 'Socialist', 'Sex' or 'Religion'. But what it shares with these other rabble rousing terms is that it evokes something different in each person the word is fired at.

This week, Fiji Water threatened to close their water bottling plant in Fiji -- not because they object to the country's military regime, but because the government announced that they intend to increase the business tax on bottled water.

I spied a disposable water bottle nearby, and it struck me: what better, more direct way to teach kids-- and adults, for that matter-- about how we've gotten ourselves into this mess in the first place?

Not only does bottled water take valuable water resources from locations around the country that need them, but it uses huge amounts of fossil fuel to bottle and deliver it, leaving in its wake a literal ocean of unrecycled plastics.

For the last three decades, prominent restaurants have been used as a vehicle to promote this sadly wasteful product. And just like consumers, many of us have been lead to believe that what's in the bottle is somehow safer than what is in the tap.

Bottled water is a joke, one of the biggest consumer and taxpayer ripoffs ever. I applaud California A.G. Jerry Brown who said recently that he will sue to block a proposed water-bottling operation in Northern California by Nestle.